PJ Vogt

He tries to bring outrageous delight on behalf of the public interest.

But even for him, this is a story where, when he imagines its next act, his imagination offers some particularly bleak outcomes.

To Jesse, the possibility that Trump just pays his friends about $2 billion of taxpayer money so it'll somehow end up back in his pocket would actually be not as bad as another outcome.

The worst one he can imagine is this, that Trump has about $2 billion now and he fulfills his promise to pay the January 6th insurrectionists.

And now he has something that looks a little bit like a paramilitary group.

people who do violence at his command, who he then gets out of jail and pays.

What does he do with them next?

Is America flirting with something darker here than we flirted with before?

I don't know what to make of that.

You can make the mistake of driving yourself crazy imagining terrible futures.

You can make the mistake of summoning terrible futures by telling yourself they'll never arrive.

But the facts that we know are that the president has nearly $2 billion at his discretion, and he won't have to tell us who he pays it to.

And, Jesse points out, this fund also contains language that's meant to inoculate Trump, his family, and his family organization from IRS audits, past audits and possibly future audits, depending on how a court interprets the language here.

All of this, of course, will be challenged in court.

To some degree, what happens next has to do with judges and politicians and the next election, but it also has a lot to do with us, with what we decide is worth our sustained attention.

We're gonna take a short break.

When we return, we will go back, in a way, to the beginning.

This whole story started, weirdly, because a lot of very wealthy people wanted to avoid paying their taxes.

And some journalists thought if they could get more people talking about this, that might be a good thing.

People are talking about it.